Author Philip Roth to retire: ‘To tell you the truth, I’m done’

Philip Roth announced retirement to French mag Les inRocks last month

Celebrated U.S. author Philip Roth quietly announced his retirement last month in a French magazine, Salon.com is reporting, saying that his 2010 book Nemesis will be his last.

“To tell you the truth, I’m done,” the 78-year-old Roth told French magazine Les inRocks last month, in comments that were printed in French and translated by Salon, then later confirmed by a representative for Houghton Mifflin, the author’s publisher.

Roth told the magazine that he had come to the decision to retire after worrying, at 74, that he had wasted all his time writing — so he re-read all of his favourite novels, and then read all of his books (which number 27 in total) in reverse chronological order: “I thought it was rather successful,” Roth told the magazine of his experiment, according to Salon. “At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said: ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ This is exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had. And after that, I decided that I was done with fiction. I do not want to read, to write more.”

“I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.”

Philip Roth published his first novel, Goodbye, Columbus, in 1959. He went on to win praise among critics and fellow authors, and has been awarded several literary prizes, including a 2011 Man Booker Prize for lifetime achievement.